element webapp: “This homeserver would like to make sure you are not a robot.”
me: clicking on the checkbox to open the captcha
google: “Your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now. For more details visit our help page.”
I could turn off all my privacy settings, addons, and vpn, but that’s not really the point of using privacy-respecting services like matrix.
Matrix isn’t exactly a privacy-respecting service. Its goals are propagating data across multiple servers, linking and duplicating it to third parties like Discord and Slack and Facebook, and keeping it intact.
Right now, if you request a GDPR compliant data deletion, they won’t delete any messages you’ve sent*, and “your username will continue to be publicly associated with rooms in which you have participated.”
* messages intentionally remain on the server until housekeeping functions kick in, which is true for any account… But those functions only clear rooms that have no participants at all.
Its goals are propagating data across multiple servers, linking and duplicating it to third parties like Discord and Slack and Facebook, and keeping it intact.
This sounds pretty misleading, but maybe I’m just missing something.
Do you mean that for rooms that are bridged to one of those platforms will have the messages synchronized to that platform?
This is not the case for most of the public rooms, and in any user-created room an administrator is needed to set up bridging.I definitely could have been more specific there; bridging isn’t built into their servers or rooms by default. Several use it, but definitely not all.
Matrix’ team itself calls this feature “an important idea” and they advertise it as part of their ecosystem
If you are using encrypted rooms the messages you send cannot be seen by the server admin. Yeah, they can check with which users and rooms you are talking to but not the content of the messages.
That’s true, they can’t see the contents of the messages, but the metadata is pretty considerable – i.e. they know what rooms you were in, when you were there, how long, and what it was called, including after you’ve left. “Seamus joined #IRAontheground and was immediately appointed to moderator, and sent 50,000 messages, but we don’t know what they said.”
Just use a different homeserver
Spin up your own server so the only person in control of your metadata is you.
Another think to add to the list of things that never ever happens to me. (I use firefox fork and DDG)
